


here is the repeated image of the lover destroyed

by deadwine



Series: 17hols prompt fills [1]
Category: SEVENTEEN (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Ambiguous Relationships, Angst, Future Fic, M/M, Post-Break Up, Sad Kim Mingyu, post disbandment
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-09
Updated: 2021-01-09
Packaged: 2021-03-11 02:53:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 617
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28388085
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/deadwine/pseuds/deadwine
Summary: Mingyu pieces himself together the way he began and yet, he finds, time does little to fade the deepest scars imprinted on his skin.
Relationships: Jeon Wonwoo/Kim Mingyu, Jeon Wonwoo/Kim Mingyu/Xu Ming Hao | The8, Kim Mingyu/Xu Ming Hao | The8
Series: 17hols prompt fills [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2099856
Comments: 4
Kudos: 13
Collections: Seventeen Holidays





	here is the repeated image of the lover destroyed

**Author's Note:**

> written for 17hols round one on [dreamwidth](https://17hols.dreamwidth.org/3914.html?thread=11082#cmt11082) for this prompt:
>
>>   
> Hello, darling. Sorry about that. Sorry about the bony elbows, sorry we lived here, sorry about the scene at the bottom of the stairwell and how I ruined everything by saying it out loud. Especially that, but I should have known. You see, I take the parts that I remember and stitch them back together to make a creature that will do what I say or love me back. 
> 
> \- Richard Siken, Litany in Which Certain Things Are Crossed Out 

Mingyu pieces himself together by rewriting the songs that broke him.

A solo trip to Paris. An apartment more than an hour away from Gangnam. A day at the Met when he happens to be in New York. A personal Netflix subscription. On a rare weekend when the agency lets him off, he visits Minseo and she brings out the box he left on her doorstep the night he ran away.

_Some scars fade with time._

Pieces taken out of old costumes and stage props begged off of the visual department almost tint him fonder now than he was then. Residuals of the clutter from his bedside tables and spare items of makeup don’t jog much of his memory but they do provide Minseo an opening to call him a hoarder. There’s a smaller bag inside, soft to the touch but heavy. They turn it upside down and its contents scatter over the tiled floor. Minseo watches knowingly— _helplessly_ — as Mingyu gathers it all up, packs it into his car and leaves.

_Others, not so much._

He lets the past back into his bed, unraveling the thread holding the bag together and unscrewing the cap on the things that bubble up to his throat— _regret regret regret_ — things he's kept bottled for years.

_The Fujifilm is great for taking pictures of people, of happy crowds,_ Mingyu remembers the salesperson telling him, _outstanding for its contrast and colours._ The images scattered across his bed are muted, bare; Seokmin’s smile hollowed out on a paper half a decade worn are proof these have nothing to do with happiness. The only reason the corners of the prints don’t blur like he was told they would is because Minseo tends to tragedy with far more care than he does.

Mingyu notes, with bitterness, there are some impressions even time and disuse can’t palliate. There is no mistaking the brightness with which Minghao and Wonwoo bloom onto his work— his sheets, his reels, his polaroids, the unseen fissures of flesh where his skin stretched thinnest, splinter-happy pleasure points. Lenses would change as would the size of their apartments and the price that audiences paid to recast them inhuman but Minghao and Wonwoo glowed unwavering until the spark burnt itself into Mingyu’s eyes—

_— love streaming out the wrong way._

The longest distance between two bodies is time but the years he’s traveled have not shed the weight of twelve broken hearts, far heavier to carry than his own and a Mingyu who lived his entire life spelling these hearts whole _forgets_ : the black sky and the lights and the scene at the bottom of the stairwell. Wonwoo greying out of his life and Minghao’s crimson storm. He forgets _didn’t you realise we were on the verge of something big_ and _how could you ever think this was worth more than our labour._

But Mingyu’s hands— one holding the body of the camera and the other on the shutter, an eye fixed on the viewfinder, a breath away from freezing time— have not yet learned reason. They don’t know of Mingyu crying, phone clutched to his ears as Minghao’s quiet— final— _you have to know this is happening because you left_ reverberates across his parent’s living room as the evening news blares in the background, something about yet another boygroup that ran out of fume too soon. They know not of Wonwoo’s silence like a beloved channel on the radio gone quiet after ten years— until a hushed wedding, an invitation left behind at the door of a building Mingyu haunted, Seokmin’s trembling fingers pressing it into Mingyu’s palm.

The Fujifilm knows a Kim Mingyu in love, still. It paints Wonwoo blue, Minghao red.

**Author's Note:**

> title and prompt both are from [the same poem](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/48158/litany-in-which-certain-things-are-crossed-out)  
> [twitter](https://twitter.com/deadseoull)  
> [cc](https://curiouscat.me/deadwine)


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